The God of Justice, and the Justice of Humankind

Jesse Watters

“He just believed the election was stolen,” Jesse Watters said last week on his recently minted prime-time Fox News show. The “he” in this statement is, of course, former President Donald Trump, arraigned last week for his part in fomenting the January 6^th, 2021, insurgency. According to Watters, if Trump sincerely believed his legitimate reelection was stolen, violence was justified. As Watters and Greg Gutfeld both state, proving Trump didn’t believe this is nigh-on impossible.

Hearing this last week, I mentally time-traveled to President George W. Bush’s second term. As Operation Iraqi Freedom dragged on, suffering terrible mission drift and causing incalculable harm, a right-wing talking point arose that President Bush didn’t necessarily lie in falsely claiming Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction. Calling it a “lie,” conservative prognosticators claimed, implied Bush knew his statements were false. A “lie” wasn’t necessarily a false statement; lying required intent, which is unprovable.

In both cases, we witness conservative pundits defending Republican Presidents based not on actions, but belief. If President Bush believed, in the chambers of his heart, that WMDs existed, then he wasn’t morally culpable for deceit; he was as misled as the American people. (We now know this is measurably untrue.) Likewise, if President Trump legitimately believed the 2020 Electoral College outcomes were insidiously doctored, then his sincerity morally shields the legality of his actions.

We should immediately reject this argument. If one’s moral state protects the legality of one’s actions, then Americans would never prosecute minors as adults, even for violent crimes. Yet American prosecutors do this frequently, asserting that the heinousness of crimes committed by minors, especially Black minors, overrules the diminished moral capacity of youth. In these cases, action defines morality. But pundits claim that Presidents—America’s most morally culpable people—are somehow shielded by their sincerity.

Even beyond this prima facie contradiction, foregrounding belief unearths a vipers’ nest. It introduces a twisted variation on the Christian doctrine that only God knows the contents of a human soul. Despite what we’d sometimes prefer to believe, humans can neither let somebody into Heaven, nor condemn somebody to Hell; these options belong exclusively to God. Shifting the parameters away from what Bush or Trump did, to what they believed, makes justice a divine prerogative.

The Accused

At least nominally, jurisprudence focuses not on the defendant’s morals, but upon actions. Did the accused actually hurt, steal, or kill? We may consider aggravating factors, such as whether the violence seems disproportionate. Prosecutions for first-degree murder may consider whether the actions demonstrated “depraved disregard for human life,” as by elaborate advance planning or coordination. But even in these cases, we don’t question the impurity of the defendant’s soul, but the severity of their actions.

Using these standards, we can evaluate the Presidents’ actions, without considering their mental or spiritual state. Even if President Bush believed, with the solemnity of church, that Iraq possessed WMDs, members of his administration stated unequivocally that no such weapons existed. Bush notoriously overruled their objections. Likewise, Jack Smith’s indictment of President Trump takes Trump’s beliefs of the table in Paragraph 3; Smith spends 45 pages unpacking Trump’s actions, not his mental or spiritual state.

These right-wing pundits negate all questions of action by asking: do they know they’re committing a legal or moral crime? Even laying aside the base hypocrisy of the fact that they only apply this question to Presidents, they also replace a legal question with a theological question. They declare Presidents, or at least Republican Presidents, as members of the Elect, saved from earthly sin by God’s inscrutable movement. Their only judgement is the Final Judgement.

Earthly courts obviously cannot judge human hearts. That’s why jailhouse conversions usually don’t create thorny legal issues: if the incarcerated is legitimately penitent, well, the penitentiary has done its (supposed) job. Keep up the good work. Legitimately run courts, in the English Common Law tradition, care only about the accused’s actions—and, in Trump’s case, those actions played out on live television. Bad actions for benevolent reasons are still, in the court’s eyes, bad actions.

Even if this premise wasn’t bad-faith partisanship, we should still resist this intrusion of spiritual judgement into the earthly justice system. The law does not, indeed cannot, judge what happens inside a person’s heart or mind. Though courts have some latitude to judge purposes, for instance self-defense, these conditions should remain exceptional and rare. Once courts start judging anyone’s beliefs or intentions the state assumes God’s role. And that fact alone should cause bipartisan concern.